I do want a deep emotional story to the game but I didn't have time to flesh out something during this jam. I do want to include it in another iteration with cut scenes and the like.
The sound obviously I did not get time to complete due to poor time management which I'll get better at over time. I'll be adding music and sfx to the next iteration of the game to keep a look out for that :)
The kanji/chinese characters represent the 5 emotions happiness, sadness, fear, disgust and fear. I was going to introduce them slowly one at a time for more emotional effect but I did not have time to make more than 8 levels as I wanted to focus on quality of levels rather than quantity for this jam.
You make a good point about the lack of visual clarity on the character, there's a reason I make the void spit out particles when you're inside it. I didn't want an outline on my character because it would take away from my theming of souls completely filled with emotions, that's why I'm exploring these other means such as particle effects to expose your position instead, as well as a very noticeable idle animation.
If you start as a specific color and move towards a gate of that color, even if you change color midway, you'll go through the gate. This is bug I noticed during development but I did not have time to fix because it's pretty complicated, instead I intentionally designed the last level in that way so the bug adds to the complexity of the level. I will fix this bug in the next iteration though.
This other bug is when you unlock all the altars and die, the exit remains open (although not visually). This is a bug I was alerted to after submission deadline and have already fixed locally, it will be published in the next iteration of the game after the judging is completed.
Thank you very much for your lengthy review, I appreciate it :)